Alice tells Bob: "Outside you're X, but inside, you're (really) Y!" This means that Bob belongs to, claims to belong to, or at least seems to belong to group X but behaves like someone from group Y. This usually implies that Y is evil, intolerant of X, or at best mutually exclusive with X. Ultimately, this is a way to call Bob a phony.

Often used to accuse someone of being a Category Traitor. Like N-Word Privileges, these can be applied teasingly between friends or toward oneself, but they're heavily context-dependent and can cause great offense if misused.

"Beefsteak" was used by Nazis to deride former socialists who they suspected of only joining the Nazis / SA / SS due to pressure: brown on the outside, red on the inside.

And the other way round: After World War 2, ex-Nazis joining the Austrian Socialists were called "Punschkrapferl" - outside red (or pink), inside brown.

Other

The giant statue of Christ recently built in Poland got some "concrete on the outside, empty on the inside" comments. (Actually, these are both bad as in Poland "concrete" is used to mean something unable/unwilling to reform, such as die-hards of the old regime.)

"Crunchie" is an (extremely mild and rarely serious) insult to intelligence, meaning brunette on the outside, but blonde on the inside.

Here, Loveless is using "yellow" to refer, not to race, but cowardice.

Literature

When The Baby-Sitters Club went to summer camp, one of Jessi's cabin mates referred to her and Mallory as "Oreos." It may not have been meant as a racial slur (although Jessi took it as one), given that the insult was clearly supposed to include Mallory, who isn't black.

In the Star Trek novel Spock's World, when a Vulcan points out that Spock is halfblood, Kirk spends a good few words pointing out his real meaning — namely, that because Spock is a halfblood, he's "a fake Earth person", not a Vulcan.

In Seveneves, Ivy Xiao, who commands the International Space Station, succinctly sums up her PR problem:

"To American viewers, I'm not fully American. To Chinese viewers, I'm a banana."

In an episode of Scrubs, Dr. Cox derides Turk for being whiter than he is.

On Veronica Mars, Hispanic students who excel in school are called Coconuts: brown outside, white inside.

In Prime Suspect 2, the black British police officer Bob Oswalde is also called a coconut.

Used as a Stealth Pun in Kamen Rider Gaim; Baron's default banana-themed suit of armor is designed to look like a combination of samurai armor and European-style plate-mail.

On All in the Family Lionel Jefferson calls a real estate agent an "Oreo cookie", explaining to the Bunkers that it means "black on the outside, white on the inside." The insult backfires with Archie, who says, "Yeah, he seemed like a decent guy to me, too."

A short-lived South African comedy series called "The Coconuts" focused on a suburban white family that get turned black by a sangoma when they set up their camper on sacred ground.

There's an episode of King of the Hill where Khan's idol, Ted Wassonasong, calls him a banana (yellow skin, white inside), after which Khan tries to get in touch with his Laotian culture.

The lesson is remember your heritage and don't let anyone tell you how to live your life.

Inverted on American Dad!. Francine (adopted by Chinese parents) gets a sitcom about her stand-up act, and in the first episode her sitcom parents express dismay at her white husband. When she protests "I'm white!", her sitcom mother says "You're a reverse banana — white on outside, yellow on inside!"

In the Drawn Together episode where Ling-Ling gets his "Asian eyes" fixed, Godzilla shows up and accuses him of being a "Twinkie": yellow on the outside, white on the inside.

On The Cleveland Show, Freight Train complains that cops won't help black people, in reference to two cops who are both black.

Freight Train: All cops are white on the inside!

Cleveland:(cheerfully) Like an Eskimo pie, or a coconut!

In another episode, Cleveland calls Federline a "lame inside-out Oreo."

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